The Very Bad News

Hi, my name is Cat.

October 3rd, 2013 was my birthday and one of the worst days of my life. On this Thursday, I found out that my younger sister, Steph, was diagnosed with cancer. A few days later, we would discover that she, at the young age of 30, was afflicted with Stage 4 Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia, a type of leukemia that is more common among men in their late 50’s or older. Reported cases of CLL are rare for her age group and gender, affecting less than some 1%.

Steph had been feeling more fatigued than usual and, while on campus two days prior to her cancer diagnosis, (she’s studying business at a local state university) she felt faint. At home, she suffered a severe nosebleed that seemed to come out of nowhere. When she called me and told me about her strange symptoms, I immediately became alarmed. I was hoping that maybe she was anemic, but, deep down, I feared the worst and couldn’t even bring myself to think it. I called our father, a family practitioner, and asked him to bring home a kit for a blood draw. I wanted a sample sent to the lab as soon as possible for analysis. The panic in his voice, when I described her symptoms, was palpable. He later told me that he couldn’t concentrate for rest of his work day because his mind set was as anxious, if not more, than my own.

The results were devastating. Her hemoglobin count was below 4.0, her white blood cell count was nearly 400,000...numbers that sent the ER, her oncologist, and hematology/oncology department at the hospital into a panic. For reference, a healthy young woman her age would have a hemoglobin count of somewhere between 12.0-14.0 and a white blood cell count of about 10,000.They had never seen such catastrophic numbers in a patient before. And, yet, there she was...sentient, walking, talking, laughing, and had a great attitude. The staff joked that she wins first prize for highest recorded WBC count at the hospital. Her oncologist admitted that he had expected to see someone knocking on death’s door but was amazed to see her in such a reasonably healthy state for someone in her condition.

We suspect that her cancer has been progressing at an extremely slow rate, possibly over several years, allowing her body to adjust until the numbers grew too severe.